In a customary gesture in books like this one,[1] Jan Westerhoff asks in his introduction what the purpose might be in his writing another history of Buddhist philosophy, given that those already available were written by such eminent scholars. In this case, the eminent scholars are Volker Zotz (writing in German), Emmanuel Guillon (in French) and Edward Conze (in English); hence the nearest rival to Westerhoff’s new book is Three Phases of Buddhist Thought in India by Conze, published in 1962. In the Preface to Conze’s work, that particular eminent scholar laments the ‘hideous and brutish noises emanating from machines’ (p.7), that deepen the spiritual darkness of our times; he wonders about the point of a history of Buddhist philosophy in the ‘age of the moron’ (p.9); and moans that ‘no Oxford or Cambridge professor would demean himself by paying the slightest attention to his colleagues of ancient India’ (p.9).

How very miserably last-century that seems now. Times must have changed, since Jan Westerhoff is the Professor of Buddhist Philosophy at Oxford. This is not to say that lots of people are now paying attention to Buddhist philosophy; but Westerhoff’s academic post is a an important sign of the increasing interest in, and integration of, Buddhist (and Indian) philosophy into a more multi-cultural approach to philosophy in contemporary academia and beyond.[2] And his new book, The Golden Age of Indian Buddhist Philosophy, is a significant contribution to that interest and integration. In short, his book is simply the best high-level introduction to Buddhist philosophy now available, by a yojana.[3]

Jan Westerhoff likes to dress in a three-piece suit, sporting a handkerchief in his jacket pocket, and a middle parting in his hair. This academic style rather separates him from older Buddhist studies professors, who tend to be the product of the 1960s counter-culture, or the more recent Buddhist studies types, who are still a bit fringe. So what led him to Buddhist philosophy? His background is in mathematical philosophy, but he did a second doctorate on Nāgārjuna,[4] and it is evidently the philosophical rigour of Nāgārjuna’s philosophy and Madhyamaka that has attracted him.[5] All this might have led to a forbiddingly intellectual history of Buddhist philosophy, but The Golden Age turns out to be very readable (if not exactly beginners-level) in the sense of focussing on essentials, without attempting to go into too many details.

Westerhoff’s Introduction sets out his method, which is to treat Buddhist philosophy as a ‘game’. This sounds odd, since Buddhism as such is not a ‘game’ but the teaching of the way to awakening; but it begins to make sense as one considers that intellectual activity is not in itself the way to awakening, which is beyond words, but is rather connected with the clarification and correction of assumptions and views which are relevant to the life of training towards awakening. The various arguments between philosophers does in fact resemble a game – a serious, hard-fought kind of game, though not much like football. And, in fact, the actual history of Buddhist philosophy in India has very distinct ‘sides’ (Abhidharmikas, Mādhyamikas, Yogācārins), individual philosophers tending to identify with one of the schools. Westerhoff goes on to describe the factors involved in this game. As well as (a) arguments and (b) sacred texts there is (c) meditative practice. That is, Buddhist philosophy is not just an intellectual activity, but it also involves the conceptual exploration of what Westerhoff nicely calls the ‘meditative phenomenology’ (p.8) of Buddhist practice, whereby certain frameworks of thought give rise to particular meditative experiences. This in turn leads to the re-interpretation of sacred texts and the valuing of certain arguments. So this game is not much like chess either.

Now Westerhoff can discuss the material that the philosophical game works with. It consists of (a) teachings of the Buddha (both the original teachings and the later Mahāyāna ones), (b) debates in the intellectual culture of India, (c) commentaries on the teachings and debates, and (d) doxographies, or accounts of the various views held by various schools. From this it becomes evident that Buddhist philosophy presented itself in a very different way to western philosophy; not much in terms of independent works by individual philosophers, but taking the appearance of interpretations of Buddhist teachings within a debate framework. The dependence of Buddhist philosophy on the acceptance of Buddhist teachings leads to a situation in which philosophical activity appears to take for granted beliefs (for instance, in yogic powers, or in Padmasambhava’s mythic attributes) that are far from ‘rational’ in the western sense. At this point Westerhoff invokes a methodological principle that is both refreshing and radical. Rather than either dropping the naturalistic assumptions of western thought, or dropping the specific Buddhist commitments of the thinkers he is writing about, he proposes a charitable acceptance of those Buddhist commitments and a ‘bracketing’ of our naturalistic assumptions ‘in order to see how far we can go in our analysis without appealing to them’ (p.32). The result of this kind of immersive philosophical method turns out to be one of visiting a strange, unfamiliar intellectual landscape in such a way that one gradually starts to feel at home.

In Chapter 1, Westerhoff explores Abhidharma as philosophy. It soon becomes evident that his approach is quite discursive and narrative, outlining the historical development of the philosophical schools, describing their texts and interests, characterising their particular approach and how a modern reader might appreciate it. The philosophical content of the chapter on Abhidharma consists in sketching its ontology of dharmas in relation to Buddhist teachings, and in contrasting differences between Abhidharma schools. Westerhoff pays special attention to the dominant Sarvāstivādins, presenting their arguments for the peculiar view that past and future dharmas really exist. His principle of charity becomes very evident here, since Sarvāstivādin views are far from attractive, least of all to a Madhyamaka. His section on the Pudgalavādins is likewise sympathetic, stressing the continuity of the view of the real existence of the person with later views of Buddha-nature, while leaving it open whether these views are compatible with Buddhist teachings.

As might be expected from an expert on Nāgārjuna, Chapter 2 on Madhyamaka is crystal clear, though its emphases are surprising. Westerhoff invites readers to bracket their naturalistic assumptions about the life-span of Nāgārjuna, to get at the significance of believing he lived for 600 years and had magic powers: this belief may have been a way to make sense of claims made about different people called Nāgārjuna. Moreover, the story that Nāgārjuna was entrusted with the Prajñāpāramitā Sūtras by the nāgas starts to make sense once we appreciate how Nāgārjuna, in his main work (the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā), presented arguments to support what Westerhoff calls the ‘doctrine of illusionism’ of the Perfection of Wisdom literature. Rather than trying to determine a version of Nāgārjuna’s philosophy that would be acceptable to humanistic assumptions, Westerhoff rather emphasises the difficulties of understanding Nāgārjuna, and the large questions that remain for understanding his apparent toleration of contradiction. Westerhoff’s Nāgārjuna is an interpreter of prajñāpāramitā through the hermeneutic of the two truths. He goes on to describe the ideas of commentators on Madhyamaka, such as Buddhapālita, Bhāviveka and Candrakīrti; it came as something of a shock to me to discover how little space the brilliant Candrakīrti gets in a history of Buddhist philosophy, so rich is the tradition. In this chapter, Westerhoff also continues a theme from Chapter 1, of setting Buddhist philosophy into a broader setting of Indian philosophical debate, in this case how the Mādhyamikas were concerned to argue against the realist philosophy of Nyāya. This approach emphases Westerhoff’s unwillingness to try to naturalise Buddhist philosophy into western philosophical narratives, but rather to expand the reader’s horizons.

Chapter 3 concerns Yogācāra, which Westerhoff prefers to try to harmonise with Madhyamaka rather than portraying the schools as rivals. Westerhoff discusses key Yogācāra concepts (the three natures, the ālaya-vijñāna or foundational consciousness, mind-only, and so on) at length, and there is another surprising emphasis here. He notes how contemporary western accounts of Yogācāra tend to argue against an idealist interpretation of mind-only, by emphasising epistemology rather than ontology: that ‘mind-only’ refers to the thesis that we can only know the world in terms of our representations of it, representations that (the Yogācārins argue) depend on the mind; this is not the same as claiming that the world does not exist. His point is that idealism is totally out of fashion in western philosophy, but that is not a good argument for interpreting Yogācāra as non-idealist. Westerhoff’s own contribution is to argue that, according to the Yogācārins, ‘the true nature of reality can only be known through meditation’ (p.178), so that the Yogācāra arguments for representation-only are more like denials of the discursive assumptions of ordinary people.

In Chapter 4 Westerhoff moves on to the later logico-epistemological thought of Diṅnāga and Dharmakīrti. These thinkers had in fact already appeared in section 2 of Chapter 3, which seemed rather out of place in what was not the best-organised chapter of the book.[6] But in the present chapter, their thought is presented with a clarity that soon reveals their work to be the nearest that Buddhist philosophy gets to some of the enduring concerns of western philosophical thought about knowledge and language. Diṅnāga argues that knowledge through perception consists not in the recognition of some real thing ‘out there’ in the world, but in the conceptual construction of representations from the information that appears to the senses. This is a kind of phenomenalism, and Westerhoff’s contrast of Diṅnāga’s and Dharmakīrti’s philosophical view with the view of the Mīmāṃsā school, that language involves a correspondence of words to things, is a helpful way into the issues, as they were seen by Indian philosophers of the time.

In some Concluding Remarks, Westerhoff returns to a theme implicit through his whole presentation: that of the relationship of philosophical thinking to the meditative methods of Buddhist practice. He invokes the name of Pierre Hadot, whose work on philosophy as a way of life, in the context of ancient Greece and Rome, emphasises how philosophical discourse was in service to the practice of spiritual exercises and debate, for the sake of achieving the goal or aim of life as conceived in a particular school.[7] From this point of view, it is important not to approach Buddhist philosophy with the assumption from contemporary western philosophy that it is an ‘exercise of reason, for its own sake’ (p.283). The meditative dimension of Buddhist philosophy makes such an approach unlikely to do justice to what is essential. Rather, Westerhoff recommends ‘doing philosophy with ancient texts’ (p.284), which means bracketing naturalistic assumptions, putting oneself into the midst of the particular problems that Buddhist philosophers were concerned with, and appreciating the methods – meditative as well as argumentative – that they employed to solve them. Sādhu, Jan Westerhoff!

[1] The book reviewed here is part of an ongoing OUP series: ‘The Oxford History of Philosophy is an open-ended series of books which will weave together to form a new history of philosophy’ (OUP website) .

[4] Which eventually became Nāgārjuna’s Madhyamaka. A Philosophical Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2009.

[5] Recent works include The Dispeller of Disputes: Nāgārjuna’s Vigrahavyāvartanī, Oxford University Press, 2010, and Crushing the Categories: Vaidalyaprakaraṇa by Nāgārjuna, Wisdom Publications, 2018.

[6] Not only is Chapter 3 somewhat disorganised, but the book as whole contains many typos and errors; the final copy seems not to have been proofed. This is odd, considering the beautiful production of the text, complete with marginal text box summaries, à la King James Bible.

[7] See Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Blackwell: Oxford, 1995; and especially What is Ancient Philosophy? Harvard University Press, 2004. See also my blog post.

In 1994, a clay pot containing ancient birch-bark scrolls appeared on the antiquities market in Pakistan, and was acquired by the British Library. Richard Salomon was one of the first scholars to inspect these fragile scrolls, and to discover that they were written in the Gāndhārī language, in kharoṣṭhī script, and were the oldest Buddhist manuscripts ever found. Since 1994, more collections of Gāndhārī manuscripts have been acquired, and an international team of scholars, with Salomon among them, has dedicated itself to studying them. Having in 1999 written the first guide to the new discoveries[1] – with photos and illustrations that make it still a valuable work – Richard Salomon has now written a non-specialist guide to the highlights of what has been discovered about the Buddhist literature of ancient Gandhāra, including an anthology of translations of the wide range of sūtras and stories that have been worked on so far. This is completely compelling reading for anyone with an interest in early Buddhist literature or Buddhist history. Not only does Salomon write with a wonderful clarity and precision, that allows us to enter into a very specialist world of scholarly study, but the newly discovered Gāndhārī literature opens up whole new perspectives that were simply unavailable before.

Although I had read Salomon’s earlier introduction, as well as some of the specialist volumes published by the University of Washington,[2] and even attended a fascinating seminar on a particular Gāndhārī scroll with Dr Mark Allon at SOAS in London, I found the experience of reading this comprehensive new introduction quite exhilarating. The first three chapters present an overview of the history of Buddhism in the Gandhāra region and some context for understanding the significance of the Gāndhārī literature that has begun to come into view. Ancient Gandhāra comes into the historical record with coins and inscriptions from the period when it was under the rule of Greek and Indo-Greek kings; the paracanonical text The Questions of King Milinda contains fictional philosophical dialogues of the Bhikkhu Nāgasena with the Indo-Greek King Menander.[3] The heyday of Gandhāran Buddhism, however, was the first centuries of the common era. The Kushans, originally from Central Asia, ruled their empire from there; many Buddhists will be familiar with the Hellenic-influenced style of Gandhāran Buddhist sculptures from the Kushan period. Scholars already knew about Buddhist literature from the area, since the discovery of a Gāndhārī version of the Dhammapada in the late 19th c.[4] So although the revelation in 1994 and since of many more scrolls and fragments was not a complete surprise, the implications are nevertheless profound.

This was proof that there had existed Buddhist canons in local languages, such as Gāndhārī, comprising similar, but by no means identical, texts to those preserved in Pāli and Sanskrit and translated into Chinese and Tibetan. The implications for the study of early Buddhism are profound. There are still those who believe that the Pāli canon is in some sense the authentic record of the teaching of the Buddha, even that the Buddha spoke Pāli. This view is now comprehensively refuted, at least as far as sensible scholarship goes. The Pāli canon is the one surviving version of the canon in its original Indian language; but evidently there were others. Since, on the basis of comparative study, there are many small differences between versions, the conclusion must be that the Pāli canon is not ‘the’ authentic record of the teaching of the Buddha, but simply the version of it preserved in Pāli by the Theravāda tradition.

Salomon goes even further than this. In his conclusion, he makes a comparison between the emerging picture of relationships between the various Buddhist literatures and texts with the discovery made by scholars of human paleontology, that there is not in fact some linear chain of hominid predecessors to modern Homo sapiens, but rather a “tangled bush” of ancestry. Likewise, the early Buddhist texts we now have can rarely be traced through a process of transmission to a single ancestor – representing, perhaps, a record of the original teaching of the Buddha – but rather what we have is a “tangled bush” of transmission lineages and textual traditions, among which none can claim to be the authentic one. In this way, Salomon follows contemporary scholarship in suggesting we speak of “Buddhisms” rather than a single tradition whose various branches can be traced back to its founder. That said, these various Buddhisms are not in fact all that different from each other, and in practice the variations among different texts and traditions generally speaking add to the richness of the tradition considered as a whole, although the fantasy of discovering ‘the Buddha’s original teaching’ now looks impossible rather than simply very difficult to achieve.

Another exciting discovery that the study of Gāndhārī texts has made is evidence in support for what has come to be called “the Gāndhārī hypothesis”. This is the hypothesis that the originals for many of the early Buddhist texts translated into Chinese in the first centures of the common era were not in the Pāli or Sanskrit languages, but rather in Gāndhārī. The evidence is linguistic but in some cases compelling. This turns out not to be entirely a surprise, however, since the Gandhāra region is on the Silk Route, the route by which Indian Buddhist spread to China. This in turn brings to mind to existence of whole canons of Buddhist literature in languages now lost to us, and the plurality and diversity of Indian Buddhism in its early days.

However, after the exhilarating opening chapters, so rich in scope and implications, when one comes to the anthology of translations of the newly-discovered Gāndhārī literature, one might feel some disappointment and even frustration. The old scrolls, written on crumbling old birch-bark, yield mere parts of texts, all incomplete, some mere fragments, and much of it hard to decipher. Additionally, although Gāndhārī is a middle-Indo-Aryan dialect (a Prakrit), a cousin of Pāli, a niece of Sanskrit, the scholars working on the Gāndhārī manuscripts have hardly anything else to go on as they try to read the texts they have. There are idioms, spellings and grammatical features that are otherwise unknown. Hence the the twelve chapters containing illustrative translations of the best-preserved or most interesting texts are frustratingly partial. So much of what we would need in order to compare these texts with Pāli or other versions is missing. The translations that Salomon presents are like a random selection, picked out of the lottery of time and chance, many of which have to be padded out with translations from parallels preserved in other languages so that they can even be made to make sense.

Further reading, however, transmutes this sense of frustration into a quiet sense of the revolutionary importance of these old texts for our understanding of early Buddhism. The range of texts that Salomon translates is significant in this regard. There are early poetic texts, such as stanzas from the Dhammapada, and texts with parallels among the mainstream Buddhist sūtras. But there are also stories of the Buddha’s disciples and their karmic backgrounds that seem peculiar to the Gāndhārī tradition, suggesting how Buddhism varied across regions even in its homeland of the Indian subcontinent. There are also fragments of ancient commentary and Abhidharma, which shed fascinating light on the varying traditions of how Buddhists thought about their own texts and traditions. And then, as a kind of fabulous encore, there are extracts from an early Perfection of Wisdom sūtra, giving us a valuable window into the early history of Mahāyāna.

A highlight of the volume for me was chapter 3, entitled ‘The Rhinoceros Sūtra’. I had already studied Salomon’s specialist volume on this early Buddhist poetry, each stanza of which concludes with the line, “one should roam alone like the rhinoceros”.[5] The Gāndhārī version of the Rhinoceros verses present many of the same stanzas as the Pāli version, but in a different order. Their existence in Gāndhārī, as well as in Pāli and Sanskrit (in the Mahāvastu) suggests just how popular the verses were among the early Buddhists, perhaps being included in a curriculum for new monastics, hence much-copied and among the best preserved of early texts. Salomon includes a lot of prefatory material to his translation which is easily the best introduction to the Rhinoceros Sūtra available, exploring the concept of solitude in early Buddhism, and the peculiar attribution of these verses to the paccekabuddhas – the ‘solitary Buddhas’ who lived before ‘our’ Buddha arrived. For me at least the book is worth its cover price for this introduction alone.

I was not completely satisfied with Salomon’s scholarship, however. In his chapter on some verses from a Gāndhārī version of the Dhammapada, he includes a translation of a stanza with a parallel preserved in Pāli:

“[A monk] who removes anger as soon as it arises, as one removes [snake venom with herbs as it spreads through the body, leaves behind] this world and the next [as] a snake leaves behind its old worn-out skin.”[6]

The phrase “this world and the next” in fact recurs in a series of stanzas here which, following their name in Pāli, we can call the uraga (‘serpent’) verses. In a note he comments:

“The exact sense of the phrase translated as “this world and the next” (orapara = Skt orapāram) is a problem that has been extensively but inconclusively discussed by traditional and modern scholars.”

I myself have contributed to this discussion but, far from leaving the translation inconclusive, I have come up with a suggestion for an understanding and translation that, although not proven, goes a long way to making sense of not only the phrase orapāra but also some other long-standing issues of understanding and translation of the uraga stanzas.[7] Actually, orapāra does not exactly mean “this world and the next”. Rather, it means “this shore and the far shore”, and the idea that this is a reference to “this world and the next” is an interpretation among several possible interpretations, in a metaphorical context typical of a poetic text. Indeed, the most obvious interpretation of “this shore and the far shore”, or so I argue, is as a reference to a discourse which by some happy coincidences is not only preserved in Gāndhārī, but is translated in Salomon’s new volume, in ch.2, as ‘The Parable of the Log’.[8] In this discourse, the Buddha, while looking at a log floating down the river Ganges, entreats his monks not to get stuck on the near shore or the far shore, the near shore representing the six senses and the far shore the sense-objects, but instead to keep going to reach the ocean, which represents nirvāna.[9] This is not the place to go further into how to fully understand either ‘the Parable of the Log’ or the uraga verses and their parallels in the Gāndhārī Dhammapada, but I was pleased to find that Bhikkhu Bodhi has taken up some of my suggestions in his recent translation of the Suttanipāta.[10] I do not of course suppose that Richard Salomon should necessarily agree with my arguments or conclusions, but my point is more that he seems not to know about them. This in turn suggests that his translations more generally may not always reflect all the scholarship available on the various texts he translates.

I should hope that most readers of this review will, quite rightly, take my very particular criticisms to be those of a disgruntled specialist. They should likewise conclude that, if such a tiny criticism is all that this reviewer can come up with, Salomon’s translations sound good enough. Indeed, generally speaking his translations combine accuracy with a wonderful readibility. Richard Salomon is that rare creature, a scholar who writes beautifully.

This new volume represents more than an account of first impressions of the literature of Gandhāra. It is more like a deeply considered summary of what has been discovered in the first twenty years of its study. But there is more yet to be studied, and there is the likelihood of yet more ancient birch-bark manuscripts turning up, hopefully not just on the antiquities market in Pakistan, but in their archaeological context. So there is every chance that this book will be followed by more. Let us hope Richard Salomon writes them. These are rich times indeed for the study of early Buddhism.

[3] The Milindapañhā now exists only in Pāli, but is thought to have been translated from a north Indian original.

[4] Edited by John Brough as The Gāndhārī Dhammapada, SOAS, London, 1962; his discussion of the text and of the Dhammapada generally are legendary for their thoroughness and caustic wit, but he does not deign to translate. Valerie Roebuck’s translation of The Dhammapada (Penguin, London, 2010) contains some selected translations of those stanzas in the Gāndhārī Dhammapada that are not in the Pāli version.

[5] This is my translation from the Pāli; Salomon translates the parallel Gāndhārī phrase as “wander alone like the rhinoceros”. Some of Salomon’s thinking ended up in an article I wrote on translating this line, which Bhikkhu Bodhi translates “one should live alone like a rhinoceros horn” (Bodhi, trans., The Suttanipāta, Wisdom, Somerville MA, 2017, p.182f.). See Dhivan Thomas Jones (2014), ‘Like the Rhinoceros, or Like Its Horn? The Problem of Khaggavisāṇa Revisited’, Buddhist Studies Review, 31.2, pp.165–78.

[6] Salomon p.196. While this stanza is included in the Gāndhārī Dhammapada, its Pāli parallel is found in the Pāli Suttanipāta v.1, with another in the Sanskrit Udānavarga (another traditional name for the kind of anthology we know as the Dhammapada). The square brackets here enclose words supplied from the Pāli version, missing in the fragmented Gāndhārī text, a typical example of how much has been lost from the birch-bark scrolls.

[7] Dhivan Thomas Jones (2016), ‘“That bhikkhu lets go both the near and far shores”: meaning and metaphor in the refrain from the uraga verses’, Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, 11, pp.71–107.

A recent article in the Guardian (that I read via a post about Buddhist Action Month) shares some new research about the environmental effects of meat and dairy farming compared to growing cereals and plants. The results are stark; “even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing”. In short, growing peas has a comparably miniscule environmental impact compared to raising beef. And the opening words of the article sum up the implications: “Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet.” So should we eat peas?

I decided to try being a ‘domestic vegan’ 18 months ago, following a hunch that it was time to give a predominantly plant-based diet a go. By ‘domestic’ I mean vegan at home, but not strictly outside. Previous attempts at veganism had been idealistic but short-lived, though overall I have maintained a mainly organic vegetarian diet for 32 years. This time round veganism is easier: it’s more popular, so there are more vegan dishes on offer in restaurants, and more vegan burgers in shop freezers. The invention of Oatly Barista means that vegan coffee drinking is actually pleasant. Still, as the narrator in Simon Amstell’s film on veganism, Carnage, jokes: “a breakthrough in the quality of nut cheeses” would really make a difference.

So I find myself wanting to encourage others to shift to a plant-based diet. As part of doing so, I’d like to present a way of thinking about the ethics of veganism, as it is important to pitch this appropriately. I will conclude that veganism is not an ethical obligation, but rather a reasonable consequence of valuing universal welfare.

From a Buddhist point of view, there is nothing wrong with eating meat. It is well known that the Buddha himself was not vegetarian. On occasions, I get offered cooked meat. If the alternative to my eating it is that the meat gets thrown away, I sometimes eat the meat. Buddhist ethics is based on the principle of not harming living beings, and having an attitude of kindness. What follows from that principle is that one should not act in such a way that animals are knowingly harmed. This precludes buying meat or choosing it on the menu. Vegetarians also avoid fish and seafood since these creatures are harmed by being caught.

But what if the cow or chicken or salmon has been reared with care on an organic farm, and has been killed in a humane way? My brother has started breeding his own sheep for meat, on a very small scale. A lot of petting of happy lambs goes on. My feeling here is that eating carefully-sourced meat is much better than eating meat produced on big industrial farms which are indifferent to animal welfare. The maximisation of animal welfare should be an ethical priority. However, this leaves a residual ethical issue regarding what one might describe in terms of assenting to the intentional deprivation of life. No animal wants to die, but prefers to live and flourish in its own way, just like us. If there is an alternative to eating meat, is it right to kill an animal against its wish? However, the argument here is not straightforward, since domestic animals by definition come into existence by being useful to humans. One might therefore argue that it would be better if domestic animals did not exist. However, in terms of practical ethics, it is still good to maximise animal welfare, even if in theory it would be better still if animals reared to be eaten did not have to exist at all.

This way of thinking about Buddhist ethics does not directly entail veganism, though veganism is a way to contribute to animal welfare. A common argument for veganism among Buddhists has been an ethical perfectionism: that one ought not harm living beings, hence one ought to avoid eating meat and dairy. This argument does not convince me. Ethical perfectionism may be admirable, but the environmental impact, and hence harm to living beings, of human life on this planet is complex. I would rather understand Buddhist ethical perfectionism in terms of working on deep-rooted mental states, as well as on speech and action. Dietary perfectionism is too narrow.

To put it more practically, one of the things that has held me back from turning to a plant-based diet was uncertainty about whether it was any better to eat imported soya beans than local cheese. The environmental impacts on rain forest life are unknown, whereas the positive effects of local organic farming are tangible. My scepticism about dietary perfectionism, together with uncertainty about environmental impacts, meant I had insufficient reason to become vegan. However, the new research presented in the Guardian is completely unambiguous. The evidence is clear that it is would be much better for the planet for human beings to be vegan.

This shifts the ethical emphasis away from animal welfare, and towards the health and diversity of the whole natural world. The human population is heading inexorably towards 10 billion, every one of us wanting to be well-fed. There is a corresponding pressure on land-use entailing environmental changes that are mostly detrimental to biodiversity. With this, the consequences of our continuing to eat meat and dairy will be the impoverishment and degradation of non-human habitats.

The ethical argument for becoming vegan that follows from this perspective is not based on dietary perfectionism, nor even from an ethical obligation not to harm living beings. It is simply an appeal to the welfare of all beings. The welfare and flourishing of the whole planet is good in itself. Human actions that diminish this welfare will harm humans too, for we exist as part of the living whole. From this positive appeal to universal welfare some simple practical reasoning follows. If we believe that human activities are responsible for global warming and environmental change (for which there is plenty of evidence), and if we value the earth’s biodiversity and flourishing (essential for our long-term welfare), then it is reasonable to shift to a plant-based diet, and we ought to do so. Whatever changes we make to our diets, away from meat and dairy, will be good ones to make.

It could be tempting to turn this into a Buddhist ethical argument. Since it is wrong to harm living beings, but right to practice kindness and compassion, then the wholesome or ethically skilful course of action, based on what we now know about the effects of farming practices, is to choose and to promote a vegan diet. But I don’t find it personally helpful to relate to food in terms of right and wrong. I would prefer to promote the positive value of universal welfare, and to invoke the ideal of the bodhisattva, who seeks the well-being of all. From these positive commitments, together with new evidence regarding farming, the practical conclusion rationally follows: “Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet.” Eat peas!

The six tapestries that make up the exhibition currently in Bristol have been touring the country for some years, since the 2012 Channel 4 series on taste that inspired them. I was converted to Grayson Perry’s art by an exhibition at the Arnolfini, here in Bristol, last autumn. A variety of Perry’s stuff was on display – his pink motorbike (with travelling shrine for Alan Measles, the teddy bear); his bike (hanging in the stairwell); various big fired pots exploring Brexit, fame, masculinity, etc.; and a Kate-Middleton-brass-rubbing-themed skateboard (‘kateboard’). The exhibition was entitled The Most Popular Art Exhibition Ever! and it was totally, unreservedly populist. I watched children under ten talking among themselves about how to interpret certain works. I heard the most unlikely people getting interested in the wide-open images and ideas – the significance of the internal physiology of a giant bear (personifying the financial system), or the collected detritus of lost empire around a steel skull (skeletal Great Britain). Grayson Perry, with his eye-shadow and big dresses and opinions, is a great ambassador for art.

Then there were the tapestries: big, colourful, computer-woven tapestries, incredibly detailed, textured, inviting, intriguing. My favourite piece from the Arnolfini exhibition was an enormous (3m x 7m) tapestry called Battle of Britain 2017, a portrait of modern Britain inspired by a Paul Nash painting. Perry manages to capture the mood of a south-east English rural-industrial landscape in winter; it is bleak but pulsing with life, drama and hope: a young man on a BMX looks out over a blighted landscape that is blessed (ironically?) with a rainbow. Despite looking at it closely on each of my visits, it was only during my fourth that my niece pointed out the dead body.

The six tapestries of the Vanity tour are smaller – 2m x 4m. They make up a series, inspired by Hogarth’s prints of The Rake’s Progress (reproductions of which, along with David Hockney’s series on the same theme, hang nearby). But whereas Hogarth’s Rake comes into his inheritance and spends it on gin and women, and Hockney’s art student discovers homosexual liberation in New York, Perry’s Tim Rakewell is a clever kid who makes good, crossing class boundaries, making a fortune – but finally dying in a car crash. That’s the apparent narrative, anyway, the meaning of which is quite hard to fathom, and not exactly ‘moralising’ in the way Hogarth’s prints are. But that’s part of what I like about Perry’s work: the way it takes you into myriad associations, without an Apollonian intention. It’s more like life: ambiguous, detailed, unpredictable, but recognisably about something, though the something never stays still.

The first tapestry is called The Adoration of the Cage Fighters. Two battered old male survivors present Tim, dandled by his blond-haired young mother, with a football kit and a miner’s lamp. Women neighbours watch and smoke. A photo of a man on a motorbike might be Tim’s absent father. The living-room is full of the kind of kitsch found in many working-class homes. Perry reflects simultaneously on class, masculinity, community, heartbreak and hope. The thematic elements are each familiar, but brought together they create the particular drama of the fictional Tim Rakewell.

And on it goes. In the second tapestry, The Agony in the Car Park, Tim’s step-father sings like Elvis, as if to a Saturday crowd in a working-class social club. Tim and his mother cringe at his feet. Outside club buildings, young people pimp their motors. An older man stands proud outside his pigeon loft. The shipyards are desolate and the sea is full of doom.

In my personal favourite, The Expulsion from Number 8 Eden Close, student Tim and his middle-class girlfriend leave the empty achievements of Tim’s upwardly mobile mum and stepfather, incongruously represented as dwelling in rainbowed Eden, to enter the confident, articulate world of the girlfriend’s Tonbridge parents, whose books and music and ethnic giftware show off their outward-looking attitudes. I could relate to certain themes in that image.

That, of course, is part of Perry’s attraction – that most people can directly relate to his works, in one way of another, and thus they can feel part of Perry’s intelligent reflections on life. But then again Perry’s pots and scultures and tapestries are all very much about the narrative surface of things. They are popular because they are all celebrations and questionings of consensus social reality. So then I start wondering about a Buddhist critique of Grayson Perry: his work is all surface, an art-party, a play of tattoos on the skin of the world, with neither depth nor transcendence. It is a celebration of everything that the Buddha went forth from, and nowhere does it even question the world. From a Buddhist point of view, it might seem to be mere chatter; it is a machine-made entertainment distracting its viewers from the truly beautiful. Once one has started down this path of criticism, Perry’s work unravels. The titles of the tapestries each refer to famous themes from Christian art, but these are vacuous references, going nowhere. The various visual gestures that Perry makes within his images – the postures of the cage-fighters like those of the adoring Magi; the mirror-image in The Annunciation of the Virgin Deal echoing Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding – are knowing and witty, but turn out to be mere echoes that die into the wilderness of reflections.

And then in meditation, pondering why I just liked these tapestries so much, I realised that it is their very rejection of depth and transcendence that is intriguing. Nowhere in Perry’s work is there any fantasy suggesting the possibility of successful escape from the social and quotidian. To enter his world, you have to own your class, gender, bias, skin and Britishness, and admit where you stand amid diversity. You start to feel the pullings on the surface of things, a surface knitted and knotted by time and family and class and whatever our own personal traumas have been. Since there is no hint of an elsewhere to escape to, you feel into the actuality of your being, the texture of what has made you.

But just as there is no transcendence, there is no depth either; no neurotic production of psychological narrative about why you feel so bad and why it went so wrong. Instead you have to stay woven into the big picture, at the frayed end of a never-ending process, tangled with everyone else everywhere in the world.

Tim Rakewell does well. Having made his fortune, he buys a big house, like George Harrison or Madonna, the kind of place which the old upper-classes can’t afford to run anymore. In The Upper Class at Bay, he looks like Mr Andrews in the Gainsborough painting, but his estate has been taken over by an Occupy camp, the young people protesting about inequality. Although most Buddhists will neither buy a stately home nor fight a class war, I can see that, for all that we seekers after awakening might disdain social class, there is no escaping social and historical processes. Converting to Buddhism is itself a theme in post-Christian post-youth-revolutionary western culture, and by learning to meditate you don’t forget your accent or your schooling. At best, you identify with it less, maybe, and learn a different kind of mobility.

The car crash ending is unexpected and disturbing. Tim seems to have had a middle-age crisis, got another, younger, wife (called Amber), but lost control of his car in some kind of male-ego situation on the road. Amber’s alive, but Tim died in the arms of the paramedics. His stretched-out form is pietà-like, but with his white underpants and bulging belly he is no saviour, just another corpse, made of the wastage of ambition and hubris. But Tim didn’t deserve this; nor does it look like it was his karma. It was just an accident, bad luck, on the back of some personal crisis.

Without depth or transcendence, there’s neither meaning in nor explanation of Tim’s demise. You can’t work out if you were supposed to feel anything, though the crash-gore was horrible and shocked you. What did Perry mean to communicate? My gaze fell on the nurse, in whose arms Tim has died. She has not tried to escape her fate, but gives herself to her work. Likewise, the green-clad paramedics, with their machines, attending with patience and professionalism. On the tangled surface of things, among the snapped threads, there are points of relaxed tension, patches of smoothness and order, whose meaning is found only in relation to everything else. So one might imagine the bodhisattva, taking her place in the weave, not identifying with some small part of it, but working to manifest whatever beauty might be possible.

The Vanity of Small Differences is in Bristol Museum until 24 June 2018, before going to Scunthorpe 7 July–8 September, and then Blackpool 27 September–15 December.

I met the author of More Than Happiness, Antonia Macaro, at a mindfulness retreat in 2016 led by Ven Anālayo,[i] and then again in November 2017 at a Bodhi College weekend on ‘Philosophy as a Way of Life’. An encouragingly large number of us listened to Stephen Batchelor and John Peacock talk on philosophy and Buddhism, before ourselves engaging in informed, lively discussion on the theme of the relationship between philosophy and Buddhism as ‘ways of life’. The kind of ‘philosophy’ we are talking about here is not the kind of analytic enterprise taught in modern universities, which is concerned mainly with abstract philosophical problems and arguments. Rather, it is philosophy (‘love of wisdom’) as the actual thinking and living and striving towards the best kind of life for human beings. This sense of ‘philosophy’ was brought to widespread attention by the scholar Pierre Hadot in his pioneering book Philosophy as a Way of Life.[ii] Macaro’s book is a very down to earth and practical introduction to Buddhism and Stoicism as two specific philosophical traditions of thought and practice, bringing into view their common features and concerns, and highlighting the value of a philosophical life.

We could regard More Than Happiness as a contribution to what appears to be an emergent cultural engagement with what we might call ‘secular wisdom’. Western culture has become so post-Christian that there is a big hole where religion used to be; and meanwhile human beings have as great a need as ever, in the midst of scientific and secular culture, for ideas that might guide their lives. The steady growth of Buddhism in the west is one response, but another is a smaller-scale but significant resurgence of Stoicism. This philosophical tradition goes back to 4th c. BCE Greece. A philosopher named Zeno founded the Stoic school, named after the stoa poikile or ‘painted porch’, where they first met in the middle of Athens. The Stoicism that is resurgent today, however, is based on that of the Romans, especially of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, whose works have survived in a more complete form. When, in modern English, we say someone is ‘stoic’ or ‘stoical’, we mean that they endure pain and hardship without complaining. Such an attitude is not untrue to the what Stoics actually valued (while the word ‘epicurean’ is merely a caricature of the Epicurean school of philosophy), but there is also a complex ethical and metaphysical world-view behind Stoicism, of which a level-headed resilience is a useful outcome.

As a summary and comparison of two practical traditions of thought, Macaro’s book is excellent. It is very clearly written, without technical detail but never vague or unclear. Chapter 1 is a scene-setting, in which she gives an overview of Buddhism and Stoicism and explains her approach. I am not a scholar of Stoicism, but judging from her presentation of Buddhism, which I know more about, she has an exact and accurate sense of what recent scholarship reveals about the earliest phase of the traditions. She addresses the knotty problem of the degree to which traditions like Buddhism and Stoicism are religions. In their historical forms, both involve what we would call religious claims; but, for the sake of this book, she extracts useful teachings from each that are compatible with a secular or naturalistic worldview. She presents with an admirable economy the way both traditions have developed philosophical methods and frameworks for their account of the human condition and how to flourish in it.

In Chapter 2, she sets out the starting problem for any philosophy of life: the existential problem we face, called dukkha by the Buddhists, simply mortality for the Stoics. Buddhists and Stoics agreed that false conceptions about the sources of happiness and a misleading tendency to seek satisfaction in the wrong places leads to suffering, and that an attitude of renunciation is the beginning of a spiritual life. In Chapter 3 she explores the shared idea of philosophy as healing, and spiritual practice as therapy. While the Buddhists proposed a deep transformative insight of our wrong views and emotions to be the basis of health, the Stoics proposed an examination of our faulty beliefs, which are the basis of emotions and decisions. In Chapters 4 and 5, she presents the goals of each tradition: the ideal of nirvāna for the Buddhists, and the particular kind of eudaimonia, ‘happiness’ or ‘flourishing’ cultivated by the Stoics, specifically, ataraxia or ‘tranquillity’, a state of emotional calm brought about by completely reclaiming responsibility for one’s own thoughts and beliefs.

In Chapter 6, Macaro turns to the theme which lends her book its title: how the goals of these traditions is ‘more than happiness’. Both traditions stress discipline and tranquility, but also ethics, meaning that the ideal for each is a way of living in relation to what is good. Chapter 7 turns to what each tradition proposes as the kind of appropriate view for the living out of their respective ideals. Macaro does not entirely accept the value of renunciation, as taught by both traditions, emphasising rather the ‘seeing clearly’ that allows us to see things in a correct perspective. In Chapter 8, she discusses the human ideals presented by each tradition: that of the ‘sage’ for the Stoics, and the ‘Buddha’ for the Buddhists. She notes the perfectionism of both traditions, and the difficulty of their ideals, but also how adherents can move incrementally towards emulating these impossibly far-off figures of the Buddha and the sage. Then in Chapter 9, Macaro turns to the kind of practices and spiritual exercises through which Buddhists and Stoics develop and grow. Both traditions involve training, through such disciplines as mindfulness. Chapter 10 summarises ‘10 meditations inspired by Buddhist and Stoic insights’ that we could take into our lives. Here we see what is really meant by ‘philosophies of life’: pithy themes for reflection, such as the advice to ‘consider the bigger picture’. Such themes are easily memorised, but are also tied into well-argued systems of thought, so that we can use them in day to day life, and also develop our understanding of what they entail through study and reflection.

I’ve summarised all this to give a sense of what the book covers. For someone new to the idea of philosophy as a way of life, More Than Happinessis a clear, accessible and accurate guide to both Stoicism and Buddhism. It doesn’t aim to raise too many questions, but rather to gather from both traditions what seems most useful for the contempory spiritual seeker. I would like now, however, to step back from the what the book says, to what it assumes and doesn’t say. In this way I hope to place the book in a bigger context.

The Buddhism that Macaro has chosen to discuss is, as she describes in Chapter 1, what is now called ‘early Buddhism’, which is the kind of Buddhism that is evident in the discourses of the Pāli canon. However, this kind of Buddhism is also something of an abstraction, because it is a reconstruction by modern scholars and teachers of a way of thought preserved in early Buddhist literature. Since it exists as a reconstruction in the minds of modern western readers, it is a form of Buddhism that is especially attractive to those wishing to develop a secular form of Buddhist spirituality. But one might wish to contrast this construct called ‘early Buddhism’ with some actual Buddhist traditions, such as modern Theravāda, which revolves around the living tradition of monastic practice; or Tibetan Buddhism, with its extraordinary devotionalism and its philosophical debating culture; or with a modern Buddhist movement like Triratna, with its distinctive emphases on friendship and the arts. This contrast reveals how the ‘early Buddhism’ that Macaro assumes to be Buddhism in her book is a somewhat thinned-out and de-materialised version of the various existing traditions of Buddhism.

This, however, may be a little unfair. Perhaps the version of Buddhism that Macaro evokes is nowadays quite alive in the contemporary flourishing of insight meditation retreat centres, such as Gaia House, which are not tied to particular lineages of Buddhist practice, being more eclectic as well as oriented quite specifically to modern secular culture. But, even granting that ‘early Buddhism’ is alive and well in the form of insight meditation teachings, Macaro’s version of it stops short of exploring the crucial role of community or sangha for spiritual life. The versions both of early Buddhism and of Stoicism described in her book assume a reader interested in a sort of personal and private spiritual life, consonant with the privatization of religion in contemporary secular culture. It might be, however, that this misses out on how participation in spiritual community is the condition for personal transformation. When Buddhists ‘go for refuge’ to the Sangha, they acknowledge the role of the spiritual community in their Dharma lives. From what one can gather, the tradition of Stoicism was more of a personal and private philosophical orientation, but then again (especially in its Roman phase) the Stoic outlook was often most popular among those involved in public life, immersed in the social and political, such as the Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius.

By drawing attention to the assumptions the author makes in her presentation of Buddhism and Stoicism, I do not particularly mean to criticise her aim or method, which is perhaps to address the contemporary reader in the comfort (or discomfort) of their secular homes. But I would like to prompt anyone who reads Antonia Macaro’s book on towards a deeper considerations of how either Buddhism or Stoicism might be successful philosophical ways of life – actually effective in ending dukkha or healing the soul. In this respect there is another factor, both for Stoicism and Buddhism, that Macaro does not discuss, which is that of commitment. It would not be unfair to say that More Than Happiness presents Buddhism and Stoicism as potentially useful traditions of thought and practice, from which a contemporary person might try to benefit.

Jules Evans, author of Philosophy For Life, an exploration of Greek and Roman philosophies as practical guides to life, distinguishes between two models of contemporary philosophical engagement. In the ‘liberal’ model, authors and teachers present ancient philosophies in their strengths and differences, to be considered and reflected upon.[iii] In this respect, Macaro’s approach represents a liberal model of philosophy as a way of life. But there is also the ‘committed’ model. In this model of philosophy, one may be attracted to some school, and then make a commitment to practice that philosophy (perhaps within its community of practitioners), and it is the existential choice and commitment that is the condition for the transformation and healing that the philosophical life promises.[iv] The role of commitment is central too to Buddhism. Having heard the Dharma one may commit oneself to practice it, and this emotional commitment becomes (along with participation in spiritual community) a condition for success. One commits to practice the precepts, and perhaps to a daily meditation practice. Commitment is important in Stoicism too. I will end by mentioning two recent books, part of the resurgent ‘neo-Stoic’ movement: A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine and How to be a Stoic by Massimo Pigliucci.[v] These books represent less the ‘liberal’ model of philosophy, and more the ‘commited’ model: they are each by authors who have made the existential choice to live by Stoicism. In this respect, they communicate the philosophy of Stoicism in a living way.

[iv] Hadot explores the various existential choices involved in the different Hellenistic schools of philosophy: see Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy? trans. Michael Chase. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2002, ch.7.

[v] William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life, Oxford University Press, 2009; Massimo Pigliucci,How to be a Stoic: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Living, Rider, London, 2017. Pigliucci also blogs on ‘How to be a Stoic’.

We owe the translation of the title of the discourse known as ‘The Fire Sermon’ to the American translator Henry Clark Warren, whose Buddhism in Translations was one of those pioneering Victorian works that brought the spirit of Buddhism into the west. Someone who read Warren’s translation was the poet T.S. Eliot, who studied Sanskrit from 1911–14, at Harvard. And Eliot’s reading of Warren’s translation resulted in his naming the third section of his 1922 poem The Waste Land ‘The Fire Sermon’. I’m sure the Buddha could never have guessed that he would get quoted in modernist literature.

The title ‘The Fire Sermon’ has a great ring to it. More literally, the title (āditta-sutta) is ‘The Discourse about What is on Fire’, or simply, ‘Burning’. And, while the so-called ‘second sermon’ is more like a Socratic dialogue than a sermon, this ‘Discourse on Burning’, is more rightly called the ‘third sermon’ – the third teaching of the Buddha. A problem of course with the English word ‘sermon’ is its connotation of a tedious long talk in a church. But all of the Buddha’s discourses were delivered out-of-doors, and they are all records of the Buddha’s attempt to directly get across his awakening experience, to the extent that it can be put into words. The Pāli canon gives us a vivid sense of how the Buddha’s teaching was always delivered to a specific person or group, always tailored to his audience’s interests and expectations. The Dharma was never primarily a set of lists or doctrines, but rather the familiar ways in which the Dharma came to be expressed were the result of the Buddha’s teaching experience to specific people over a long period.

Once again I invite you to consider the early Buddhist discourses as literature – not as any kind of more-or-less accurate record of what the Buddha said in ancient India, but as the way that the early Buddhists, after the time of the Buddha, tried to re-create in a literary form the style and impact of their teacher. This involved the development of stories, which have the look of historical accounts, but are really later reconstructions of events. One these stories is that of what the Buddha did after his awakening experience, under the Bodhi tree. It is a long and detailed story, and is preserved in the Vinaya (the book of monastic discipline). Two episodes of this story are the Buddha’s ‘first sermon’ to his former five companions, given at the Deer Park at Sarnath, and then the ‘second sermon’, which brings them all to awakening. Let me give a summary version of what happens next.

We hear about a spoiled young man called Yasa, who becomes disgusted with his superficial lifestyle, whom the Buddha converts, in a story that later is switched to the Buddha himself. Then we hear that, once there are sixty arahants, the Buddha sends them out in all directions, exhorting them to ‘wander for the well-being and happiness of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the benefit, well-being and happiness of gods and human beings’.

The Buddha then wanders eastward, towards Uruvelā (where he had gained awakening). On the way he meets a group of thirty young men with their twenty-nine wives. The girlfriend of the unmarried man has stolen their things and they are looking for her. ‘Which is better for you?’ the Buddha asks them; ‘seeking a woman or seeking for your self?’, and he converts them too. Arriving at Uruvelā, the Buddha meets three fire-worshipping dreadlocked ascetics, each called Kassapa, with their thousand followers. By performing a series of miracles, starting with the taming of a fierce nāga (python) living in one of the fire-huts, the Buddha converts the ascetics. Now follows the Buddha’s third sermon, to the former fire-worshipping ascetics (my translation can be found here).

The later Theravādin commentary adds that the Buddha thought, ‘What might be an appropriate dharma talk for these people, who tend the sacred fire in the mornings?’ And he came to the conclusion, ‘I will teach them about the six senses and their objects, comparing them to what is burning and blazing, and in this way they will be able to obtain arahantship.’ Then he spoke this formulation of the Dharma in order to teach the Dharma to these people.

The commentary can be a bit dry and literal in its interpretations of early Buddhism, but in this case it is very helpful. It points out that this particular discourse was delivered to a particular group of people, fire-worshippers, so that the Buddha tailored what he said to meet their interests and preoccupations. This is an example of what the later tradition called the Buddha’s ‘skilful means’ (upaya-kauśalya), his ability to teach people appropriately. The fire-worshipping ascetics believed that tending the sacred fire, performing fire-rituals every morning, pouring ghee into the flames to feed the gods, was the way to salvation. The Buddha gets their attention by saying, everything is burning, everything is on fire. One might imagine that they would have responded by saying, or at least thinking, no it isn’t. But nevertheless he has their attention.

What is supposedly burning and on fire? What follows is another analysis of the whole of experience. In the second sermon the Buddha used the framework of the five constituents of experience (khandhas, ‘aggregates’). In this discourse, he uses a different framework:

The five senses-organs plus the mind.

The five sense-objects plus the contents of mental experience – ideas.

Sense-consciousness.

The contact between the senses, including the mind, and the world.

Experience arising from contact.

I find this a fascinating analysis. Elsewhere, having used this same framework, he asks, is there anything else in experience apart from this all this? Of course, it is a quite reasonable and sensible belief that there is a world independent of our sense-experience, but all we ever have to go on is the experience of our senses. This is it – what is seen, heard, smelled, tasted, touched and thought – this is the whole world. Anything else is an idea in our minds. And ideas are already included.

So everything, the whole of our experience, the whole world, is burning. Now comes the twist. Burning with what? With the fires of compulsion (rāga, ‘greed’), hostility (dosa, ‘hate’) and confusion (moha, ‘delusion’). This group of three bad guys is very common in early Buddhist discourses. It is a way of characterising our basic psychological afflictions. Compulsion and hostility are emotional – they characterise attraction and aversion reactions to experience – while confusion is intellectual – characterising basic lack of understanding of what is happening. The early Buddhist teachings stress that awakening or nirvāna is the ending of compulsion, hostility and confusion. In a way, you can say, that’s all awakening is. But it’s perhaps preferable to say that the ending of compulsion, hostility and confusion is a way of describing awakening in negative psychological terms. More positively, we could add that awakening can also be described in terms of contentment, love and wisdom.

Everything is burning. It’s a way of putting the Dharma – a dharma-pariyāya, a formulation of the Dharma. Does this speak to us? I once lived in a community of men (four of us, in a half-renovated house, with two cats and a dog, and a lot of dope-smoking), and one of the men was obsessed with sex. Whatever one might say, he brought it round to sex. Beds, beaches, lawns, woods, floors, bicycles, breakfast, dinner, tea – it all triggered compelling ideas of various sorts in my friend’s mind. Everything was burning for him – burning with a specific kind of compulsion. Then there was the mother of a dear friend. Any topic of conversation one might bring up was an opportunity to be gloomy. I was once visiting with my friend, and we’d been to the park. So I said, ‘the park here in town is big, isn’t it?’; to which the response came, ‘oh, the parking in town is terrible, so terrible’. Everything was burning for her – burning with a particular kind of gloom, of negativity.

Now we can make sense of the links between the Buddha’s Fire Sermon and T.S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land. Eliot quotes the Fire Sermon like this:

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out
O Lord Thou pluckest

burning

The allusion to the Fire Sermon (‘Burning burning burning burning’) is sandwiched between allusions to the Confessions of St. Augustine, who went to Carthage as a teenager and was embroiled in ‘unholy loves’ – Augustine was burning too. Earlier in section III of The Waste Land, we read:

On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing…

These lines allude to Eliot’s own recuperation from a nervous breakdown in the seaside town of Margate in Kent. Perhaps Eliot evokes another way in which the whole of our experience might be ‘burning’ – or tingling or hurting – with the inability to connect with, or find meaning in, what is happening; a symptom of the dissociated modern sensibility, one that perhaps many of us can relate to, at least occasionally.

But the Buddha’s Fire Sermon is an invitation to overcome burning, obsession, gloominess or dissociation, by identifying it as such. The truth is that sense-experience isn’t just what happens to us – it is how the world appears as a result of our active involvement with it. The world shows up according to what we want, what we care about, what we believe, according to the quality of our attention. It strikes me that these days not many of us might be fire-worshippers, but a lot of us pay attention to the news as it is represented on the internet. In fact, it is rather easy to pay a great deal of attention, not only to the news, but to the opinions people have about the news, and then to think about our own opinions about those other people’s opinions. It’s not so much that the world is burning, but that the world is a drama. The world of our experience is a constant drama, driven by the plot-lines of compulsion, hostility and confusion.

But what happens when we notice this, and begin to pay attention, not to the contents of our experience, but to how it shows up for us? The first thing we might notice is that we ourselves are largely responsible for how the world appears and shows up. If everything reminds you of sex, or everything is terrible, or the world going to the dogs, that tells you something about your own psychological tendencies. After all, it is we ourselves who choose what to pay attention to, and how to respond or react. Of course, we are talking here about deep-rooted habitual tendencies. But they can change, and that is the point of engaging in Buddhist practice. Hence the discourse goes on to identify three stages of positive change – disenchantment, self-possession and liberation. These summarise an insight process.

In another discourse (Itivuttaka 93), the Buddha teaches the overcoming or quenching of the three fires of compulsion, hostility and confusion through three distinct methods. Compulsion is quenched by attending to the unattractive qualities of our experience. Hostility is quenched by developing kindness (mettā). Confusion is quenched by developing wisdom. If we can imagine our experience as being on fire, in terms of a metaphor of burning, then to practice the Dharma is to quench the flames:

Those who practice, day and night,
the teaching of the perfectly awakened one:
they put out the fire of compulsion,
constantly noticing unattractiveness.

Those excellent people put out
the fire of hostility through kindness,
and the fire of confusion through the wisdom
that leads to piercing through.

Those mature beings, having put out the fires,
indefatigable day and night,
are completely quenched, remainderless;
they have entirely overcome suffering.

An Introduction to the Buddha’s ‘Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic’

The ‘Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic’ (Anatta-lakkhaṇa-sutta) (my summary translation can be found here) goes by another title in Sri Lanka – the ‘Discourse to the Group of Five’ (Pañca-vaggiya-sutta); and the alternative title gives us another clue to what it’s about. The Buddha is shown as being in conversation with his five former companions in the ascetic life, so that this discourse is traditionally regarded as the Buddha’s ‘second sermon’, following the famous ‘first sermon’, the Discourse on the Turning of the Wheel of the Dharma (my introduction to which is here). At the end of the first sermon, Koṇḍañña had the insight that ‘whatever is of a nature to arise, all that is of a nature to cease’, and this insight was a breakthrough for him. It was also a breakthrough for the Buddha, who for the first time had managed to communicate something of the Dharma to someone else, enough at least to induce the kind of insight that leads to ‘stream entry’ – an irreversible engagement with the path that leads to nirvāṇa, the end of dukkha. In this second sermon, the Buddha goes on to give the ‘group of five’ a direct and specific teaching, on the ‘not-self characteristic’ – a teaching which leads all of them all to see through any confusion they might hold about who they really are, and move them on and into a liberating knowledge of how things actually are.

In my introduction to the first sermon I made the (possibly unfortunate) comparison of the Buddha’s teaching with the Abba song ‘Waterloo’– a song that announced the sudden, brilliant, appearance of soon-to-be-world-famous talent. My point was that the four ‘ennobling truths’ taught in the first sermon were like a universe-wide hit, like a memorable tune that could get the Dharma into everyone’s heads. By contrast, in the second sermon the Buddha might be said to abandon jumpsuit and boots, and put on the dark clothes and hat of Leonard Cohen, and sing something that goes straight to the heart.

This might not be so obvious from the bare words of the discourse, which, as usual, is replete not only with repetition but with a somewhat forbidding technical vocabulary. Let us once again think about the discourse as literature. It is almost absurd to suppose that this discourse represents in a literally historical way the words of the Buddha to his first five disciples. The Buddha would have been at the very beginning of his teaching career, and he was yet to develop the many ideas and methods that have been preserved in the Pāli canon. It makes more sense, I think, to suppose that the Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic represents a way of putting the Dharma that the early Buddhists considered to be especially characteristic and typical of their teacher. And by imagining the Buddha as putting the Dharma in this way to his very first disciples, the Buddhists, who composed these early discourses, were in their own way doing justice to the memory of the Buddha. In this way, one might suppose, they managed to put into this discourse a kind of condensed version of one way in which the Buddha taught.

There is hardly any scene-setting. The Buddha addressed the group of five monks while they were living together in the Deer Park at modern-day Sarnath, near Vārāṇasi. But rather than telling them something ­– as he had done in the first sermon, when he told them about the middle way and the four ennobling truths – he simply asks them questions. This is reminiscent of the Buddha’s teaching strategy when he was talking to the Kālāmas (my introduction to the Discourse to the Kālāmas is here). The Kālāmas had had enough of being told by religious teachers what the truth was, and how any other truth-teaching was rubbish. The Buddha understands this and gives them a method by which they can decide for themselves what should count as a wholesome mental state and the advantages of developing such a state. But here, talking to the group of five monks – experienced spiritual strivers, intent upon liberation – the Buddha can assume a shared understanding of ethical conduct and meditation practice. Within this framework of commitment, he leads the monks through a set of analyses of experience, designed to get them to question their assumptions and re-think their views.

Any of you who have read any Plato might recognise this method of questioning – it reminds us of Socrates, who always claimed he knew nothing except that he was ignorant, and who proceeded to cross-question his poor interlocutors until it became apparent to everyone that they didn’t know anything either. Have you ever had the experience of having your assumptions pulled out from beneath you? I had always thought Leonard Cohen was one of those hippy crooners who’d smoked too much cannabis to make sense. But then Maitridevi played me his greatest hits in the car five years back, and I saw the truth… And probably anyone who meditates regularly has had the experience that our usual way of looking at things suddenly cracks and crumbles, to be replaced by a new perspective – that perhaps our breath is not actually boring at all, or that there is in fact no obligation to hold onto our resentments. I would say, though, that the Buddha is not exactly like Socrates. He always claimed to definitely know something about awakening. On the other hand, awakening is not an idea and cannot be put into words. We each have to discover it for ourselves, and hence the Buddha’s method of leading his hearers.

So he engages the monks in a process of destructive cross-questioning. The method turns on a way of dividing up our experience of ourselves into five khandhas or ‘constituents’, sometimes translated ‘aggregates’ or even ‘heaps’:

physical form (rūpa), that is to say, our bodies, the physical stuff that our bodies are made of, the attributes of our bodies, its abilities and characteristics;

feeling-tone (vedanā), that is, the bare hedonic tone of our experience, whether pleasant or painful or somewhere in between;

perception and cognition (saññā), that is, the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch sensations and thoughts, memories and fantasies that are going on;

habitual tendencies (saṅkhārā), which are the more dynamic aspects of our experience, the familiar patterns and dispositions that we sometimes love and sometimes hate; and

consciousness (viññāna), the awareness of ourselves as being a body, having feelings, cognitions and perceptions, prone to habit, and aware of being aware.

This might sound complicated, but in practice it is relatively easy to keep these five aspects of experience in mind. Is our experience made of anything else besides these five constituents? It might be useful for us to consider how we might naturally describe our experience. I’ve always noticed that there is a body, there is thinking (in the head), there is feeling (more in the heart), and there is willing (which seems to be everywhere). The five khandhas may be a useful abstraction, that’s the point.

The Buddha then gets the monks to carefully consider whether any of these constituents is the self. By ‘self’ or attā (or ātman) the Buddha means ‘who you really are’. He presents two arguments for the monks to chew on. In the first he gets them to consider how they are not in fact able to control body, feeling tone, perception and cognition, habitual tendencies or consciousness. Is this true? If you are like me, it would be truer to say that we have some control, but not much, and not when it counts. Experience mostly just happens, and we find ourselves carried along, hoping for the best. So who are we really? I think that the most likely candidate for who we really are is consciousness. Thinking this way would mean deciding that who I really am is a deep awareness of being this same person over many years. My body changes slowly, feeling tones come and go, perceptions and cognitions change all the time, habitual tendencies unfortunately have a life of their own, but my consciousness is pretty steadily me. If I can’t control consciousness, that might be because I’m busy, or life is going badly, and a holiday or retreat might bring me back to myself. However, the Buddha will not let us rest with a conclusion like this.

The Buddha then gets the monks to consider whether the constituents are permanent or impermanent. Of course, they’re not permanent at all. So can any of them be truly satisfying? That’s quite a question. Of course, there is some satisfaction to be got from bodies, feeling-tones, from consciousness. But there is an invitation here to consider whether it is really OK that there is some satisfaction in experience. Finally, the Buddha asks the monks whether it is appropriate to say of any of a changing and partially satisfactory set of constituents that ‘this is mine, I am this, this is myself’? Of course, the way the discourse puts it, this is almost a rhetorical question. But clearly what is being suggested isn’t that the monks gave the right answers because they were good Buddhists, but that they were rehearsing a set of deep considerations about what it means to be a human being. For me, when I ask of consciousness whether it is really who I am, it soon becomes clear that after all what appears to be my self is this constant welling up of awareness which I simply continually identify with, as if I hoped it was me, as if I simply kept saying to myself, ‘this is who I am’.

But if in fact one cannot find within experience anything of which one can truly say, ‘this is myself’, this is what or who I really am, then one is free to let go of any idea that one’s experience should be a certain way, and all the emotion reactions that go with such a view. The Buddha describes this process as having three stages. There is the stage of disenchantment – no longer being under a spell, a false impression. There is the stage of becoming self-possessed – ‘dispassionate’ is the usual translation, but that might give the wrong idea of being disconnected from the heart. And there is the stage of liberation – no longer being pushed and pulled by views and emotions.

And the group of five monks gets it. Each in their own way, presumably, through their own individual process of consideration and enquiry. Their hearts and minds are freed and they are understandably pleased. They too have gained awakening and the end of dukkha. So this ‘second sermon’ gives us not so much a historical record of the awakening process of the first five disciples, but a kind of paradigm example of how the Buddha taught, and how the insight process might unfold. In fact the Buddha taught many methods and in many ways, in accordance with who he was talking to, but the Discourse on the Not-Self Characteristic tells it like it is: ‘there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in’.